You only have to look a couple of posts back to see how
excited I was for Insurgent to come
out. I had pre-ordered it so I could read it the second it was released, and I
did. But then the reading slowed, and then it got even slower. And then I just
wanted it to be over so I could read something else.
**If you haven’t read Divergent,
you’ll want to stop reading here**
Insurgent picks up
right where Divergent ended, with
Tris on the train to the Amity compound with Tobias, Marcus, Peter, and Caleb.
She is grappling with the loss of her friend Will, and the fact that she, um,
killed him. But if you don’t get that in the first page, that’s ok—it will be
thought about, talked about, interviewed about, yelled about, thought about
some more, then cried about roughly 582 times over the next 300 pages.
Now, I might sound like a heartless person here, but don’t
get me wrong. I understand that killing one of your good friends would probably
be pretty traumatic, but Tris doesn’t go through any steps of grief. She does
nothing but suppress the information, and then finally releases it at a pretty
inconvenient time, prompting Tobias to be rightfully angry with her, and prompting
the reader to wonder what exactly Tris’s motivation is for doing anything. She’s making terrible
decisions, and even in the first-person we can’t figure out why.
Weaved throughout the internal monologue of Tris’s
never-evolving grief is a plot that centers on Sensitive Information with a
capital S-I. Marcus has convinced Tris that Erudite is trying to destroy
information that should be released to the factions. (We don’t learn what the
Sensitive Information is until the last chapter of the book, and let me tell
you, it is some M. Night Shyamalan BS.) Jeanine, the leader of Erudite, is
trying to develop a serum to control the Divergent, and the factionless are
planning an uprising against everyone to re-take the city.
As you might be able to tell, there are far too many things
going on at once, and while the romance in the last book was believable and
appropriate, this time around I found myself saying, “You guys realize there’s
a war on, right? No one cares how good Tobias looks in a t-shirt.” (Side note:
I think they might have Done It? But I couldn’t really tell because there was a
chapter break. Which means that if they did Do It, it was a pretty weak way to
get it across. Ur doin’ it wrong?)
I’ve mentioned before that the second book in a trilogy is
always the most difficult because the author has to carry on the first story
while setting up the premise for the third, and unfortunately Insurgent didn’t succeed as it could
have. I would have liked to see the Sensitive Information revealed to the
characters much earlier in the book, so they knew what they were fighting for,
rather than blindly following some gut feeling. There was also just so. much.
violence. Most of it seemed pretty gratuitous, and honestly, it’s a bit
offensive to think that a book can include multiple stab wounds and
blood-covered hands and bones breaking and heads bashing, but a sex scene would
be crossing the line. Violence is worse than sex, guys. Violence is worse than
sex.
I’m sure I’ll end up reading the third book when it comes
out, but I am not looking forward to it with the enthusiasm I had for Insurgent. Have you ever stopped reading a trilogy before the end?
Insurgent's Grade: It took me 15 minutes to get this drink, and it's not what I ordered.
